I suspect that most of us who were raised in Evangelical Christianity have heard the faith/chair analogy. If you have not heard it before:
Faith is like deciding to sit in a chair. You don’t know that the chair will hold you, yet by faith you believe it will, so you sit down in the chair.
Quite deep theology there, brethren.
Here’s the problem with this analogy: sitting in a chair does not require faith. Let me explain it this way. I am a big man, so making sure a chair will withstand my considerable ass sitting in it requires me to use the scientific method of inquiry.
Before I ever sit in a chair, I ask myself, does this chair LOOK like it will hold me? Now looks aren’t enough, as I learned several years ago at a Toledo Olive Garden. After the hostess brought us to our table, I glanced at the chair and quickly sat down. Except I didn’t make it all the way down. As I started to put my weight on the chair, it kicked out from me and I landed flat on my back in the middle of Olive Garden. I hit my head on the cement floor and could not get up. The manager came running in to make sure I was all right. The only injury was to my pride. So, was the chair defective? Not at all. The chair had casters and I didn’t see them. As I started to sit down, the chair rolled out from underneath me and I fell. Because I didn’t pay attention to the construction of the chair, I ended up on the cement floor. This is what having faith in the chair got me.
Most of the time, when we go out to eat, I carefully check not only the construction of the chair, but the ingress and egress. As a disabled man, I want to know the lay of the land. Where’s the bathroom, can I easily walk to it? As far as the chair is concerned, I rock the chair back and forth and side to side, making sure it is solid, and I press on the seat, making sure it will hold me. I have been to more than one restaurant where I’ve had to ask for a different chair lest the one they wanted me to use leaves me on the floor. The only thing worse than a chair breaking is the embarrassment that comes from it (though my editor suggests that getting injured would be worse).
Using the scientific method, I test a chair to make sure it will hold me. After I have done so, and it passes the tests, I feel confident that the chair will support my 6-foot, 310-pound body. I have been a big man most of my adult life, and this method of determining chairworthiness has never failed me. The only time I have ever had a chair break is when I “faithed” it.
The faith/chair analogy breaks down in another way, because the chair is an inanimate object that I can see and touch. God can not be seen or touched, and believing in God requires blind faith.
This is one of the reasons I am an atheist. I see no evidence for the Christian God. Believing in such a deity requires faith, a faith I do not have. For me, seeing is believing, and I do not “see” the Christian God.
Hebrews 11:1,3 states:
Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear.
What is Christian faith?
- The substance of things hoped for
- The evidence of things not seen
Perhaps the wording of the NIV will make it clearer:
Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God’s command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.
Many Evangelicals get upset when someone suggests that their faith is a blind faith. But isn’t that exactly how Hebrews defines faith: believing without seeing; that faith is the proof of belief in that which can not be seen?
Creationists would do well to read Hebrews 11 the next time they try to scientifically “prove” creationism. Hebrews 11 makes it clear that believing God created the universe requires faith. It requires faith to ignore the overwhelming scientific evidence for the formation of the universe, earth, and life. Creationists embarrass themselves and besmirch their religion when they try to make creationism fit into a scientific box. And when their efforts fail, what do they do? They retreat to the safety of faith, a place they should have stayed to start with.
Bruce Gerencser, 67, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 46 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Faith is giving yourself permission to believe whatever the hell you want to believe, whether it makes any sense or not.
And this is one of the biggest word salads in the Bible.
The last part is like word salad but the first sentence is a pretty good shorthand for faith as I perceive it. Wisdom often seems brief and to the point like that. And having the virtue of brevity helps me remember it.
Oh yeah, the faith argument. Either you have it or you don’t. The very nature of faith is that there’s no evidence. If you’re going to rely on faith, that necessitates that you do not seek evidence. Once you have evidence for something, you’ve leapt out of the purview of faith. Evidence means that something is available for observation and study, just like Bruce’s chair. I can’t see atoms, but there’s evidence of their existence, and thus we’re not in a faith situation anymore.
I’ve never been ine to rely on faith. Doubting Thomas was a sensible damn hero to me. His questioning made complete sense to me, and secretly I admired his practicality in demanding evidence. Lauding people who just believe what their told – having great faith – seemed faulty to me. Is it any wonder I got out? 😄
Bruce, you share a lot of wisdom and learning with us. Let me now share a bit of what I learned about chairs that fly out from under you. I’m failing to conceive what sort of chair has casters but in any case, such a chair would be a legally defective product. A product is defective when it is unreasonably dangerous when used for it’s intended purpose. That definition fits to a T the situation you describe. I think Olive Garden should have given you a lifetime free pass for not suing them for about 500 grand. Falls like that hurt a lot and even send fragile old folks to the hospital with broken hips and tailbones, and even shortened lives. These are the cases that lift the mortgage.
The line “evidence for things not seen” reminded me of of Stephen Hawking and Robert Oppenheimer, both of whose stories made pretty great movies. A prominent part of both stories was the existence of black holes, invisible to the eye but mathematically provable by the fact that “things” that CAN be seen react in ways indicating something invisible, with mass, exists and is acting on them. Much remains unknown about black holes, but that they exist reinforces my conviction that mysteries and miracles are only what science has not YET explained. So there is evidence for the existence of things not seen, albeit not (yet) evidence fully explaining their nature.
To add to Dutch Guy’s last comment: You can make the same argument about evolution. Nobody has seen it and, barring some development that is now only in the realm of science fiction, we never will. But there is plenty of evidence for it.
I think one reason why people try to use faith to explain what science hasn’t yet explained (or explained to their liking) is that it’s more comforting to think that it’s in the hands of God/Allah/Yahweh than to know that forces shaping the universe are out of our, or any supernatural being’s, hands.